“And I’ve got a nick or two in my sword edge,” Barak remembered, fishing a piece of polishing stone out of his belt and laying his heavy blade across his lap.
Mandorallen went to his tent and brought out his armor. He laid it out on the ground and began a minute inspection for dents and spots of rust.
Silk rattled a pair of dice hopefully in one hand, looking inquiringly at Barak.
“If it’s all the same to you, I think I’d like to enjoy the company of my money for a while longer,” the big man told him.
“This whole place absolutely reeks of domesticity,” Silk complained. Then he sighed, put away his dice, and went to fetch a needle and thread and a tunic he’d torn on a bush up in the mountains.
Ce’Nedra had returned to her communion with the vast tree and was scampering among the branches, taking what Garion felt to be inordinate risks as she jumped from limb to limb with a catlike unconcern. After watching her for a few moments, he fell into a kind of reverie, thinking back to the awesome meeting that morning. He had met the Gods Issa and Mara already, but there was something special about Aldur. The affinity Belgarath and Aunt Pol showed so obviously for this God who had always remained aloof from men spoke loudly to Garion. The devotional activities of Sendaria, where he had been raised, were inclusive rather than exclusive. A good Sendar prayed impartially, and honored all the Gods—even Torak. Garion now, however, felt a special closeness and reverence for Aldur, and the adjustment in his theological thinking required a certain amount of thought.
A twig dropped out of the tree onto his head, and he glanced up with annoyance.
Ce’Nedra, grinning impishly, was directly over his head. “Boy,” she said in her most superior and insulting tone, “the breakfast dishes are getting cold. The grease is going to be difficult to wash off if you let it harden.”
“I’m not your scullion,” he told her.
“Wash the dishes, Garion,” she ordered him, nibbling at the tip of a lock of hair.
“Wash them yourself.”
She glared down at him, biting rather savagely at the unoffending lock.
“Why do you keep chewing on your hair like that?” he asked irritably.
“What are you talking about?” she demanded, removing the lock from between her teeth.
“Every time I look at you, you’ve got your hair stuck in your mouth.”
“I do not,” she retorted indignantly.
“Are you going to wash the dishes?”
“No.”
He squinted up at her. The short Dryad tunic she was wearing seemed to expose an unseemly amount of leg. “Why don’t you go put on some clothes?” he suggested. “Some of us don’t appreciate the way you run around half naked all the time.”
The fight got under way almost immediately after that.
Finally Garion gave up his efforts to get in the last word and stamped away in disgust.
“Garion!” she screamed after him. “Don’t you dare go off and leave me with all these dirty dishes!”
He ignored her and kept walking.
After a short distance, he felt a familiar nuzzling at his elbow and he rather absently scratched the colt’s ears. The small animal quivered with delight and rubbed against him affectionately. Then, unable to restrain himself any more, the colt galloped off into the meadow to pester a family of docilely feeding rabbits. Garion found himself smiling. The morning was just too beautiful to allow the squabble with the princess to spoil it.
There was, it seemed, something rather special about the Vale. The world around grew cold with the approach of winter and was buffeted by storms and dangers, but here it seemed as if the hand of Aldur stretched protectively above them, filling this special place with warmth and peace and a kind of eternal and magical serenity. Garion, at this trying point in his life, needed all the warmth and peace he could get. There were things that had to be worked out, and he needed a time, however brief, without storms and dangers to deal with them.
He was halfway to Belgarath’s tower before he realized that it had been there that he had been going all along. The tall grass was wet with dew, and his boots were soon soaked, but even that did not spoil the day.
He walked around the tower several times, gazing up at it. Although he found the stone that marked the door quite easily, he decided not to open it. It would not be proper to go uninvited into the old man’s tower; and beyond that, he was not entirely certain that the door would respond to any voice but Belgarath’s.
He stopped quite suddenly at that last thought and started searching back, trying to find the exact instant when he had ceased to think of his grandfather as Mister Wolf and had finally accepted the fact that he was Belgarath. The changeover seemed significant—a kind of turning point.
Still lost in thought, he turned then and walked across the meadow toward the large, white rock the old man had pointed out to him from the tower window. Absently he put one hand on it and pushed. The rock didn’t budge.
Garion set both hands on it and pushed again, but the rock remained motionless. He stepped back and considered it. It wasn’t really a vast boulder. It was rounded and white and not quite as high as his waist heavy, certainly, but it should not be so inflexibly solid. He bent over to look at the bottom, and then he understood. The underside of the rock was flat. It would never roll. The only way to move it would be to lift one side and tip it over. He walked around the rock, looking at it from every angle. He judged that it was marginally movable. If he exerted every ounce of his strength, he might be able to lift it. He sat down and looked at it, thinking hard. As he sometimes did, he talked to himself, trying to lay out the problem.
“The first thing to do is to try to move it,” he concluded. “It doesn’t really look totally impossible. Then, if that doesn’t work, we’ll try it the other way.”
He stood up, stepped purposefully to the rock, wormed his fingers under the edge of it and heaved. Nothing happened.
“Have to try a little harder,” he told himself. He spread his feet and set himself. He began to lift again, straining, the cords standing out in his neck. For the space of about ten heartbeats he tried as hard as he could to lift the stubborn rock—not to roll it over; he’d given that up after the first instant—but simply to make it budge, to acknowledge his existence. Though the ground was not particularly soft there, his feet actually sank a fraction of an inch or so as he strained against the rock’s weight.
His head was swimming, and little dots seemed to swirl in front of his eyes as he released the rock and collapsed, gasping, against it. He lay against the cold, gritty surface for several minutes, recovering.
“All right,” he said finally, “now we know that that won’t work.” He stepped back and sat down.
Each time he’d done something with his mind before, it had been on impulse, a response to some crisis. He had never sat down and deliberately worked himself up to it. He discovered almost at once that the entire set of circumstances was completely different. The whole world seemed suddenly filled with distractions. Birds sang. A breeze brushed his face. An ant crawled across his hand. Each time he began to bring his will to bear, something pulled his attention away.
There was a certain feeling to it, he knew that, a tightness in the back of his head and a sort of pushing out with his forehead. He closed his eyes, and that seemed to help. It was coming. It was slow, but he felt the will begin to build in him. Remembering something, he reached inside his tunic and put the mark on his palm against the amulet. The force within him, amplified by that touch, built to a great roaring crescendo. He kept his eyes closed and stood up. Then he opened his eyes and looked hard at the stubborn white rock. “You will move,” he muttered. He kept his right hand on the amulet and held out his left hand, palm up.
“Now!” he said sharply and slowly began to raise his left hand in a lifting motion. The force within him surged, and the roaring sound inside his head became deafening.